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Sensor To Monitor TV Watchers Demoed At Cable Labs
An anonymous reader writes "Cable operators at the semi-annual CableLab's Innovation Showcase have informally voted as best new product a gizmo that can determine how many people are watching a TV. Developed by Israeli company PrimeSense, the product lets digital devices see a 3-D view of the world (the images look like something from thermal imaging). In other words, that cable set-top box will know whether three people are sitting on the sofa watching TV and how many are adults vs. children. Do we really need cable and/or video service operators knowing this? It all happens via a chip that resides in a camera that plugs into the set-top box."
Oh, the inner exhibitionist in me is tingling.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
Of course, even if it gets that bad, I suspect it'd be defeated with something like duct tape. .
And then the box detects its 'blind' and refuses to run your movie, or worse, calls the MPAA for a violation of terms, and perhaps some 'circumvention prevention law' they will have bought by then, bringing down the black van onto your home..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A midget is getting annoyed that the TV won't let him watch Real Sex 10.
QamuIs Heg qaq law' lorvIs yInqaq puS
The manufacturer's homepage seems to imply that the device could be used for gesture-controlled applications, such as changing the channel without a remote control.
In other words, something like Natal.
Or to rephrase that, what does this device do that Natal doesn't have the capability to do? And that being the case, shouldn't people be equally worried about Natal spying on its users?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Only if it's equipped with a microscope
ba-ding
On the contrary. I bet it does.
One of my graduate professors at the University of Missouri is doing some work with elder care with technology like this. Getting real 3-D information from multiple cameras takes a lot of processing time, but they can segment the space in a room down to 1 inch cubes. The result is a 3-D silhouette of the objects and people moving in the room. They can tell the difference between people moving throughout the room. A small child is different from a dog in that the dog has 4 legs, for example.
They can identify whether a person is laying on the couch or has fallen. They can extract information such as the bend of the spine and whether a person favors one leg or the other. A silhouette of a cardboard cutout would appear flat to the camera.
What I described above is PHD research using some fairly complex computer vision, 3-D segmentation and pattern recognition algorithms. 3-D scene reconstruction cannot be done with a single camera. The math doesn't work. I would not expect a set-top box with a single webcam to be that good. I would, however, expect them to do motion segmentation on frames of video. Background subtraction would let them ignore the furniture in the room and identify regions of motion. From there, pattern recognition algorithms could be used to find faces and identify the relative shape of a body based on a template. Given that, you could identify whether a person was tall or short and the relative proportions of their bodies. You probably couldn't identify male or female, though. That would be a tough call. You probably could identify a dog versus a child with relative ease.
Luckily, the amount of bandwidth needed to send these images back to the cable company would be pretty massive (given everyone who watches cable in a small to medium sized city) so you shouldn't worry about that. You probably only need to worry about packets being sent back over the cable line identifying the date, time, number of adults, number of children, channel and number of seconds since the last channel change.
In Comcast America, TV watches you!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
IIRC I read this in one of Lawrence Lessig's books.
Movie studio executives, of course, hated the idea of home video. Their business model was tied to getting paid for each showing, payment per showing, and also per viewer; the rents charged to movie theatres were set on a sliding scale based on the seating capacity of the house).
RCA thought they had a breakthrough, when they showed Disney executives a cassette they had developed. It was designed for rental and could only be played once. A mechanical locking arrangement was engaged when the cassette had finished playing. The consumer would then have to return it to the rental store, which had the special tool needed to unlock and rewind it.
They demonstrated it proudly to Disney execs who said, dismissively, "This is no good to us. We have absolutely no way of knowing how many people are in the room."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Kent Brockman: "Of course, there's no way to see into the Simpson home without some kind of infrared heat-sensitive camera. So, let's turn it on."